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Den of Thieves
By James B. Stewart
Touchstone Books, 1992, 587 pages
$11.56 paperback
Pulitzer Prize-winner Stewart tells of the biggest insider trading ring in Wall Street history, during the 1980s, centering on arbitrageur Ivan Boesky and junk bond king Michael Milken (of Drexel Burnham Lambert). Both of them seem stranger than fiction. Also in the ring were Drexel financiers Dennis Levine and Martin Siegel. The first half of this 1992 bestseller lays out their get-rich schemes, and the second half tells how prosecutors nailed them.
The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders
By Connie Bruck
Penguin, 1989, 400 pages
$10.88 paperback
During the 1970s and ’80s, workaholic billionaire Michael Milken at Drexel used junk bonds, among other inventive tools, to fuel a generation of corporate raiders. In once scene, Milken raised $1.5 billion in 48 hours to finance Carl Icahn’s takeover bid for Phillips Petroleum. In 1988, the SEC charged Milken and Drexel with insider trading and stock fraud, and the U.S. district attorney followed with criminal charges.
The author Bruck, then a reporter for American Lawyer magazine, tells a good story, but her marshalling of evidence against Milken is sloppy. Drexel claimed, after the book was published, that it had not been given enough time to review the manuscript and respond to numerous errors before the book was rushed into print.
Wall Street (20th Anniversary Edition, 2007)
Starring Charlie Sheen, Michael Douglas, Daryl Hannah, Sean Young
Directed by Oliver Stone
20th Century Fox, original release 1987, 126 minutes
$13.99 for DVD
Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is a bright, blindly ambitious young Wall Street broker who, on the strength of an insider tip, gains a spectacular career and a trophy girlfriend (Daryl Hannah), but loses his soul. It’s also about Fox’s mentor, the ruthless Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), a corporate raider whose definition of “rich” is having your own jet. Oliver Stone, the director, “gives us a tantalizing peek into the boardrooms and bedrooms of the rich and powerful,” wrote Vincent Canby in a review. Douglas plays Gekko with wit and charm, eliciting cheers when he says in a speech to stockholders of a takeover target that greed is what made America great.
Stone condemns “a system that creates paper profits at the cost of diminishing products, services, and jobs,” wrote Canby. “But ultimately, his wit fails him. The movie crashes in a heap of platitudes that remind us that honesty is…the best policy.”
Douglas won an Academy Award for best actor in this role. Hannah earned a Razzie for worst supporting actress.